Korean startup Eum Bio named innovation catalyst at Swiss longevity investors conference

Eum Bio (이음바이오), a company researching anti-ageing and lifespan-extending compounds, said on September 1 that it had been selected as a "Startup Innovation Catalyst" at the Longevity Investors Conference, to be held from September 14 to 17 at Le Grand Bellevue hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland.

The conference has been held annually in Gstaad since 2020 and brings together investors, scientists and industry figures working on longevity and healthy lifespan. Each year it runs a screening process open to companies worldwide and picks a group of "Startup Innovation Catalysts," who are given a slot to present to investors and networking opportunities.

Eight companies were selected this year. They include Gero, which designs drugs that target ageing itself and works with Pfizer, and KEYONIQ of Switzerland, which offers biological age testing and a clinical decision engine. Eum Bio is the only Korean company on the list.

The conference organisers described Eum Bio as a company that "uses short-lived vertebrate models to validate the effects of healthspan interventions in far less time than conventional mouse models require."

Eum Bio has a preclinical efficacy testing platform called KilliSpan, built on the African killifish, which it says can verify the effects of anti-ageing and healthspan-extending compounds over a short period.

The killifish has a lifespan of about 16 weeks, one of the shortest among vertebrates and roughly 260 times more compressed than a human lifespan, while retaining much of the ageing phenotype seen in mammals. The median lifespan of the mouse commonly used in preclinical work is 120 weeks, compared with only four to six months for the killifish, allowing lifespan-extension effects to be measured far more quickly.

"At this conference we will introduce the KilliSpan platform to global investors and discuss partnerships," said Kim Yumi, chief executive of Eum Bio. "We intend to take an early lead in the domestic and international lifespan assessment market and, within five years, become a leading company in the discovery of anti-ageing and healthspan-extending compounds."

Kim earned her doctorate at POSTECH and has since conducted killifish-based ageing research at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany, the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). At its founding the company was selected for the 27th cohort of POSCO IMP and raised seed funding from POSTECH Holdings. It is currently pursuing a pre-Series A round.